Lawless and The Devil of Euston Square (24 page)

“Good God,” said a familiar face poking around the door. Charles Dickens made an anguished face at the sight of my bandages. “Are you quite all right, Sergeant? Oh, Kate, we must move back to the country, away from these perils. Is that the time?” he said, glancing at the mantel clock. “Barbarous. Do call on us again, officer. Good day.”

Kate shook her head. “He knows very well that clock stopped years ago.”

I started. “When exactly did it stop?”

She frowned. “A couple of years back.”

“After the theft?”

“I don’t recall. Perhaps.”

I tried to rise but there was no strength in my leg. She brought the clock over to me. It took only a moment to check. Sure enough, the clock’s workings were removed. Not an unusual practice, as Josiah Bent had taught me. Yet I could not shake off the feeling that this was a house where I had encountered too many coincidences.

MENS SANA IN CORPORE SANO

“Who dragged you out of the river?” said Wardle when I hobbled back into the office. “We can’t have officers trooping around covered in filth.”

I started in on my new theory, talking of the great sewer and how we would have to check all the houses over again, but I was overcome by a great weariness.

“Pull yourself together, lad, you’re gabbling,” he said evenly. “Go and clean yourself up.”

I stood there, my leg throbbing with pain. I had to make him understand. I rolled up my trouser leg, explaining all higgledy-piggledy about the grate and the rat and the interconnected passageways.

Wardle took one look at my leg. “Hobbling Joe, eh? Go home, then, if you must, and get better. I need you fit. Write to some of these bloody constabularies while you’re at it.” He returned to the work in front of him. When he realised I was still standing there dumbly, he looked up sharply. “Go on, off with you.”

On the walk home, the leg bore my weight well enough, but I could not straighten it at the knee, so was forced to swing it round from the hip like some sort of hunchback. How often before had I seen the beggar singing in St James’ Park? As I hobbled past, he looked in worse condition than ever, and I realised I should consider myself lucky to have legs at all. I stopped and offered to buy him a hot potato, thinking to save him some trouble.

“Potato my arse,” he scowled. “Give us the penny ha’penny.”

That day, he seemed the captain of the legions of maimed and mutilated. On the torturous climb homewards, I noticed cripples and madmen in every corner, entreating without accusation the carefree passersby. Outside my lodgings, I encountered the costermonger. He had the kindness to tell me I was white as a sheet, and gave me a bag of apples for free. I retreated to bed, feeling I had exhausted myself, trying too hard, and to no end, for I was too gentle on people, and I suffered for it, running back and forth across the city for answers I should have demanded the first time.

Sleep crept deliciously over me.

I awoke in the night in panic. With no strength to go for water, I reached for an apple. The foul taste pulled me up short. I had not pulled my shutters to, and in the dim light from the street, I could see worms wriggling in the apple’s core. I threw it down in disgust and fell back into a series of dreams. In one, I could hear an enormous creature, a mole or a worm, tunnelling beneath me till the whole house began to quake, with smoke and alarming noise. As the ground sank away from me, I found myself floating there in the newly clear sky. I looked up to find that a stage magician was holding me there, levitated in midair. I was afraid, but I looked up to find his saintly face smiling down at me, and I was filled with contentment. In another, I pursued an unseen quarry along a bold new road until I dropped from sheer fatigue, only to find that it was I who had been pursued all along, and they were upon me at once, their little fingers tickling me, scratching, clawing.

Thus began a cycle of terrible dreams and feverish wakenings. I lay there in the half-light, listening to the cries from the market. How would I gather the strength to go for help? What if I should sleep and never wake up? It made me wonder, what kind of life did I have? Who knew who I was, or cared? They might recognise me in the local tavern; the landlady would miss me if I didn’t pay the rent. But if I simply vanished there was nobody would miss me, nobody to notice. Wardle might spare me a thought, but he didn’t even know where I lived. Even if some secretary dug out the form where I had written my particulars, would anyone take the trouble of sending out to see what happened to me? In the Great Battle For Life that the papers constantly talked of, people disappeared all the time, little mysteries that stirred the meagrest interest, Londoners being fully absorbed in their own concerns. My dreams turned blacker still.

On the third day, or perhaps it was the fourth, I summoned up my strength to call for help. But my body felt indescribably heavy, and my legs gave way beneath me. I fell to the floor, crying out with pain and desperation. I must get to the stairs. I must get help or I would vanish away. I crawled towards the door but it seemed far beyond reach. My head dropped to the floor, overwhelmed by nausea.

I awoke to find water pressed to my lips. A familiar voice was speaking, gentle words which comforted me like a blanket. I fell back into sleep. I awoke again in terror that my succour had been but a vain dream. But beneath me was not the hard wooden floor, but my bed, with sheets soft and fresh. I found fresh water beside me and a glass of brandy which burned through my aching limbs. I knew I must get to a doctor. But I had heard stories enough to scare an executioner about Humbug von Quack, MD, FRS and all the rest of the letters in the alphabet, whose motto was “cure or kill”. My thoughts turned to Simpson, but how to get to the hospital I could not imagine. It was then I had the strangest of all the dreams. It was as if I were visited by a ministering angel. I heard a girl’s voice, felt a soothing cloth upon my forehead and a cool breeze. A far-off melody drifted in through the open window: one of the old songs. A chorus of voices joined in, and to that distant harmony I drifted back to sleep.

“You’ve had a close call, nor are you out of the woods yet.”

I looked up to find the corpulent frame of Simpson hanging over me.

“Merciful God,” I rasped. “Did Wardle send you?”

“Wardle?” He gave a short laugh. “No, no. I came in answer to your note.”

“I… I wrote none.”

“Did you not? Perhaps your urchin friends forged it.” He laughed again and glanced behind him. “I must be going. Put him into a cab to the Middlesex, would you, Worm? Here’s a florin.”

I raised my head weakly. “Worm?”

“The same,” he returned in sprightly fashion from the stool by the window.

“Was it you? You who helped me to bed?”

“Landlady helped,” he shrugged. “Though she was less concerned with your welfare than with loss of rental.”

“I’ll give notice if I intend to pass on.”

Worm and the Professor bundled me into a cut-price trap, doubtless taking their cut of Simpson’s cab money, and I found myself enduring the worst journey of my life. Smiling eagerly, the idiot headed under the railway and through the gasworks, the roads evidently littered with potatoes. It was the bumpiest route in Christendom, and I soon lost my joy at seeing the world again. It should have been a short ride, but we ended up in Camden Town. Might as well take me straight to Highgate Cemetery, I thought. Racing back down across the Euston Road, the cretin contrived to collide with a pony and trap. We could have been killed. More dreadful to me was the prospect of waiting hours to give evidence to a policeman. When I stepped shakily down to find Glossop striding towards the scene of the crash, I almost wished I had been killed. He looked at me in shock, and I realised how grim I must appear. I explained where I was headed. To his credit, he packed me into another cab without a word, and I arrived at hospital with my faith in humanity restored.

Over the next week, Simpson made clear it to me how narrow my escape had been. My fingers were merely sprained, but I had suffered considerable damage to the tendons above my kneecap. They might heal, given time, but I would always limp. More seriously, the gash had introduced an infection, poisoning my blood with a kind of pox which had swollen the leg so badly they considered amputation.

“You have been in the sewers, I take it?” he said sternly. He seemed to imagine I had been working down there with the Worms, and he was cross. “Rat syphilis is not the worst of the dangers of such work. I will not speak now of the necessity of using gloves and other hygienic measures. Only remember, young man, you have had a miraculous return from the underworld.”

As I regained my strength, Wardle appeared, with a bag of sweetmeats and a half bottle of whisky. I was so glad to see him I almost wept. This time I managed to communicate to him, more coherently, the notion that the sewers might offer thieves access to houses.

“I see.” He nodded quietly. “Make some enquiries while you’re lazing round here. Write to the boroughs, will you?”

“No resting on my laurels, then, sir?”

“I’ve brought paper and pen. What more do you want?” He looked away for a moment. “You get well now. The Yard will deal with the bill.”

I did not realise till after he had gone that, with my injured hand, I could do no writing. It struck me that it could only be Worm that had written to Simpson. If he had done that so effectively, why not employ him as my secretary? On his next visit, I struck a deal for his services. Soon we were drafting letters to constabularies all over the city, demanding details of thefts and requesting checks of houses’ access to the sewer network. A fine secretary he made. For, although he lost no opportunity to cheer me up with jokes, sleight of hand and other merriment, the days he spent at my bedside were highly productive, and among the most pleasurable of the whole charade.

It was two weeks before Simpson gave me a clean bill of health. I shook his hand, keenly aware that he had saved me. “Can I call on you again?” I asked tentatively. “I have some questions about some bones I’d like answered.”

“Yes, yes,” he nodded brusquely. “Good day, now.”

I?WEEP?CONTINUALLY

Though still troubled by fevers, I began retracing my old routes to and from the Yard even before I went back to work, for Simpson had told me to exercise the knee mercilessly. In those weeks, I observed Nelson’s lions under construction, watched the bold new thoroughfares cut across town, and saw the Hungerford Market torn up to make way for another train bridge.

So it was that, one warm October Thursday, the day before I was due back at the Yard, I found myself standing again before the Rose and Crown. The pub seemed now the final fortress against an oncoming invader, as the rookeries to one side and the other of the road were cleared before the underground railway’s advance. How had I so lightly walked away, I asked myself, when I was so sure that everyone in the tavern knew Skelton?

I knocked on the scullery door. A maid answered in kindly fashion, with no trace of hostility.

“Do excuse me,” I said. “I’m a friend of the Skeltons.”

“Go on up, sir,” she answered. “Only as I’m a-baking the tarts. Master’ll have my head if I don’t be watching ’em like a hawk.” She nodded, most prettily, to a door at the back of the kitchen.

I thanked her, trying to betray no surprise, and climbed with some difficulty up the dark stairs. At the top was a store room. Beside it, a door stood ajar.

“Excuse me,” I called out, knocking lightly. “It’s a friend of Mr Skelton.”

A woman’s voice, full of world-weariness, replied imperiously, “
Entrez!
”

I found myself in a room laden from floor to ceiling with paraphernalia of all kinds. It was as if a whole house had been squeezed into it, so that furniture and fittings which once complemented each other were now piled in precarious optimism. The centrepiece was a great brass bed, shrouded in green gauze, wherein lay a grand old matron, her grey hair scattered across the pillows.

“You seek,” she said in the rich tones of a foreigner, “the which Mr Skelton?”

“Berwick,” I replied. “I’m looking for Berwick.”

“I am his mother. His poor long-suffering mother. Madame Skelton.”

My heart leapt and I swayed for a moment in amazement. It was as I had said to Miss Villiers, the simplest reason a man might give a tavern as his address was that he lived there. “I am pleased to meet you, ma’am.”

“You are a man of the police, I see. Berwick has done something grave?”

“No, no,” I assured her. Not exactly, I thought, not yet. But what he might do, and why, I wanted desperately to know, so desperately that I thought little of deceiving an old woman. “I’m just an acquaintance. An admirer. You see, we… I am concerned about him.”

She turned her eyes dolefully to the window. “I wish to hear more. Close the shutter. Remove the veil. You will take beer, or I shall call for tea?”

I did as she bade, struck by her manner, like the lady of a fine house, not a room above an East End pub. As I drew back the veil, I couldn’t help but think of my own mother’s illness. I remember, as a child, being scared of going in to her; she was so weak, it felt like you were alone in that cold, dank room. Madame Skelton, however, exuded life, though marooned in this invalid bed. Stories etched in the lines of her face, she filled the place with her presence, and that indomitable voice.